SAN FRANCISCO - Intel's AppUp application store for Windows and the MeeGo operating system is out of beta and has gone gold, Intel executives said Tuesday.

The AppUp portal, which entered a beta program at the Consumer Electronics Show this January and has since amassed 450,000 users. It can be downloaded beginning Tuesday via Best Buy's Web site, and will be pre-loaded on Samsung netbooks this fall. It will also be available on the PCWorld/Curry's Web site in the U.K. beginning in November, Renee James, senior vice president and general manager of the software and services at Intel, said during the Intel Developer Conference here.

Konami, Namco, and BigFish were named as partners, and Sega is also working to port its older MegaDrive classics to the store, Intel said.

James opened her speech by talking about experiences. "We think of ourselves as technologists or developers of software. What we do is deliver experiences through our technology," she said.

"Computing has transformed from something that we do to do something that we feel," James added.

"How do we create the best experiences?" she asked. Intel's software strategy has always been to provide the best software and support for all of the development environments that developers want to use to create those experiences, she said.

James showed off a tablet from 1989, the GridPad, and compared it to the touch tablets of today, with their engaging UI and connectivity.

Intel's strategy is to build better products out in the Intel architecture, and Intel has made a number of acquisitions, including OLK Arts, Wind River, Havok, Virtutech, and Radium, all acquisitions to improve performance, visual computing, or connected devices. Virtutech, for example, provides a development agreement for the Atom processor.

Intel showed a network processor that featured improved performance by 20X or 10.5 million packets per sale, per core; 84 million packets per second on an 8-core machines,

Intel sells 90 products to support development on the Intel architecture, even on older languages like FORTRAN, James said. Of late, the company has focused more on tools for developing parallel-friendly code for Intel's multicode processors, as well as tools for media development and embedded tools. Intel counts over 22,000 developers.

Intel also seeds its development environment in schools and universities; all told, about 332,000 students have been trained on Intel's software at 2,200 universities.

The most major and surprising acquisition, however, was the acquisition of McAfee, which caught the industry by surprise. That deal has yet to close, so Intel executives have been relatively tight-lipped. James merely said that security was needed across the continuum of computing, from netbooks to smartphones.

Intel presented an award for best game to Game Creators Ltd., the developer of "Goals," a soccer simulator for Windows netbooks, and then ported it to MeeGo. His prize? A new Chevrolet Volt.

Intel has championed the MeeGo available for smartbooks and netbooks, and available across a broad range of Intel devices.

James also showed off the WeTab tablet from developer Forty-two, a MeeGo tablet that was showcased at the Tech Showcase Monday night (see slideshow). It has a standby recovery time of just one second, and a boot time of 16 seconds. It supports Android applications, Flashm, and Adobe AIR. It will ship next Tuesday in Germany.

James also announced MeeGo for TV, which was highlighted through a set-top box from Amino, running on MeeGo. The box showed off video, TV, music, and apps, including Twitter, Facebook, and numerous others.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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